


Audrsaga

by bunn



Category: Sword Song - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Gen, Iceland, Vikings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1726538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunn/pseuds/bunn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When old Queen Aud decided that she would build a new ship and sail away to Iceland, after the death of her son Thorstein the Red,  Sword Song's protagonist Bjarni decided not to go along with them. </p><p>This is what happened next for Aud.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Audrsaga

**Author's Note:**

  * For [osprey_archer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/gifts).



The sky and sea were pale and lonely: a world of empty rolling grey from which all colour and certainty had leached.  In the middle of it all, strangely solid and real, the ships; graceful Seal Maiden with the seal-head on her prow staring out through blank wooden eyes at the empty sea, and little Fionoula with her arched neck and striped sail, plunging onwards before the wind. Within each ship, endless tiny complicated detail: shaggy ponies and mournful sheep tethered in the body of the ship, nets full of hay, barrels of ale, the cages full of little red chickens, bundles of clothes wrapped in sealskin, the children huddled under a blanket....

 Aud hugged her sealskin cloak around her, peering forward over the cold grey waves. Her captain, Koll, would have preferred that she stay under the awnings around the mast with the other women, but after all, this was her Iceland-faring, and Seal Maiden was her ship, and if she chose to stand at the front and look out, then nobody would stop her.  

 But it would have been better if she could see anything but grey sea and sky.   She had imagined her own far-faring so many times, like something in a song. Blue skies overhead, the translucent glass-green whale-road carrying her onward to the great wide-wooded land set in a shining sea.  Not this grey, foam flecked emptiness.   But then, the dreams of youth never came true in quite the way you dreamed them.  

 She had dreamed herself a shield maiden, slender, fierce and beautiful, leading her own ship to the new land, and here she was, a portly greying widow, bundled inelegantly in sealskin, mildly nauseous and damp with seaspray.  And yet she was a queen leading her own far-faring none the less.

 “Shouldn’t we be able to see it by now?”  she asked Koll, who was standing next to her, looking miserable as he always did when she came up to stand at the prow to take the air.

 “Maybe, if only the fog would lift.  But there’s mist all along the horizon, look. It could be just inside that mist... or it could be another day away.”

 “You’re sure we haven’t missed it?” Aud asked. She had great confidence in Koll’s navigational skills, but she had noticed that reassuring her seemed to cheer him up.

 “Not us!” he said, and yes, there was a trace of a smile now under that tawny beard. “I’ve been here and back to Orkney three seasons now, and I’ve not missed her yet. We’ve had a fair wind and we’re on the right heading. We’ll get there yet.”

 One of the sailors shouted, and Aud looked around wildly, peering in the direction that he was pointing.  But he had not seen land.  A long black shape, as long as the Fionoula and with something of the same curving elegance,  slid through the water, half-hidden by the rolling waves, and vanished. Then, on the other side of the ship, another, and another.

 “WHALE!”

 “These waters are rich!” Aud said with delight.

 “They are rich waters indeed, and full of whales and fish. But you cannot set men to hunting these." Koll told her firmly.

 "Why not? They could feed a village for a month!"

"These are humpbacks — drag you down to Hel and your boat too, if you are foolish enough to try to spear one, and unlucky enough to hit her. Clever, too. One of them might come back for another look at us... see! There she is. Let’s hope she doesn’t get too close.”

 A great dark head breached the waves, perhaps three ships-lengths ahead, and for one moment, Aud saw a tiny, thoughtful eye, the eye of a man in the head of a sea-monster.   Then the whale dived, the long back running through the grey water, knobbled with barnacles, and then as Seal Maiden lifted lightly onto the next wave, the great tail came up in a wild spray of foam, and the whale vanished.  

 Aud let out the breath she had not realised she was holding. Her heart was racing and she felt lightheaded.

 “She could crush us and not even notice.  Isn’t it wonderful?”

 The grey day went on, and they saw no more whales.  But the mist came up and folded around the ships, and the wind dropped a little, and the grey sea calmed with the falling wind, so that the sails began to sag a little, and the ships slowed and seemed barely to move.   From the Seal Maiden, Aud could barely even see the Fionoula, following only a little distance behind.  

 The women were just sharing out the evening meal; salt cod and dried bread, a cold and unappetising meal — when there was a faint grating sound under the keel. Aud’s first thought was that the whales had returned.  Then there was a louder grating, and the whole ship lurched forwards with a long crunching sound.  Several of the men shouted.  

 There was a sick feeling to the _Seal Maiden_ ’s movement,  as though the purposeful wave-riding had turned into something limping, broken.  Men were running for the rigging and the oars. Then the whole ship swung dizzyingly sideways, lifted and came down with a decisive crunch.  Something, somewhere, made a loud crack, and the ship stopped moving.  

 The horses, down in the body of the ship, were whinnying and trying to rear against their tethers.  One of them kicked a chicken basket and set all the chickens chattering and screaming. Sheep were bleating wildly.  Erp slipped down among the ponies, touching noses and necks reassuringly.  

 Aud exchanged a quick alarmed look with Muirgoed, who was sitting as usual by her side. She steadied herself against the sloping deck, one hand on the great shaggy head of Vig, the deerhound.  She waited there, seated calmly in the shelter of the awning, and the women and children followed her lead.   There was no point setting all the passengers screaming and scrambling like the sheep.

 Koll came scrambling along the sloping deck, looking worried and embarrassed.   “Land, Lady Aud — a little sooner than I thought...”

 “Is the ship safe?”

 “We’re well aground, and we’ll not get off again this tide,” Koll told her miserably. “And worse, we’ve come in on the wrong side.  That crack was the steering oar going.  It’ll need repairing before we can put out again.

 “Well, at least we have reached Iceland, and all in one piece!  That is worth a great deal.  Do we know where we are?”  Aud scrambled awkwardly to her feet, and looked out.  She could see little, only long grey waves.  The mist hung all around them, and the long slope of the ship’s side stood above her, blocking out any view of the land.

 “Somewhere along the southern coast,” Koll told her “But how far along, I can’t guess, not with the mist as it is. When it lifts, we'll know more.”

 With Koll’s helping hand to support her,  her deerhounds following at heel, Aud managed to climb up the sloping deck, and clung on to the raised gunwale on the port side, and looked out.  They had run aground on a broad sandy shore, bare sand sweeping up into a dune dotted with clumps of tawny marram grass against a wall of pale mist.  The waves had turned the Seal Maiden sideways, before leaving her stuck, comically rolled onto one side on the edge of the dune.

 _Fionoula_ , warned by the shouts from _Seal Maiden_ , had had time to sweep out her oars before she too was driven onto the sandbar.  Now, seeing that Seal Maiden was well and truly beached, she came in, prow square-on to the sand, oars moving smoothly together.  She beached neatly, a ships-length away, her steering oar tucked neatly up and away from any possible damage.   Aud could see that there was going to be a good deal of mockery between the crews of the _Fionoula_ and the _Seal Maiden_ for many days ahead.

 “How long to repair the steering oar?” Aud asked her captain.  

 “She takes a lot of strain, does the steering oar.  I don’t think we’ll get away without shaping a new one.   Depends how long it will take to find the timber, then.  We’ve sprung a couple of planks too, but that will only need new treenails to put them back in place.  We can do that soon enough, but the oar will take longer.”

 “Very well,” Aud said, making up her mind “We’ll disembark here, and unload the passengers and the animals.”

 Getting the animals away from the perilously shelving decks of _Seal Maiden_ onto the beach was not easy.  The horses were very worried by the sloping, foam-wet decks, and despite all of Erp’s skill with them, they bridled and trampled, snorting in fear.  In the end the men began to knock out some of the planks on _Seal Maiden_ ’s upper hull on the lower, seaward side to get them out.

 Aud left Erp to take charge of that side of things.  Even when he had been a thrall, the man had had an air of confidence about him - perhaps, too much confidence.  Muirgoed had confided her fears that her thrall-son would get himself into trouble, speaking freely to the warriors, when he had no sword or spear of his own, and no training in how to use one either, beyond the toys that a toddler prince had played with long ago in Argyll.   But somehow he had carried it off.

 Now, even though he was only a freedman, the sailors and bondsmen paid attention when Erp spoke. Even Koll listened with grave respect.  Koll was the ship’s captain and more than that, he was a hersir in his own right and he could have made things difficult if he had chosen to do so.  

 But you could rely on Koll, Aud thought, affectionately.  He got on with everyone, and was blessed with a double helping of the common sense that most men lacked.  Even now, Erp, in his shabby wet jerkin and with the short hair of a thrall not half grown out, was explaining seriously that they would have to knock more planks from the hull of Koll’s precious _Seal Maiden_ to make a way out for the horses, and Koll for all his golden arm-rings was nodding his long-braided head and calling to a sailor to bring another hammer.  Koll was worth his own weight in silver; for all that he worried too much.

 Her own task now must be to get the women and children safely out of the way and begin to make a place for the night.   She turned away from the ships, beckoning a couple of her thralls to follow, and began to climb the dune.  Lilla and Signy ran ahead, laughing with delight at having the space to run again, the dark shaggy deerhounds bounding happily along beside them.  But as she trailed in their wake up to the dune-crest, Aud stopped in confusion.    Signy came careering back towards her, the dry sand spurting under her swift feet.

 “It’s all water, grandmother!  Is it another sea?”  A stretch of water lay ahead of them, calmer than the sea, but still wide and grey, rippling away into the mist, and over it a pair of seagulls flew, keening mournfully.  They were standing on a barren sandbar, with water both ahead and behind.   

 “I don’t know!  But I hope that it is a tidal pool,” Aud told her.   “But whether this sandbank we have landed on is joined to the land, and if so, at which end -— well, we shall have to find out.”

 She turned to the thralls.   “Vifil! Go to the west for a while and see if the sand rises up into proper land.    Hundi! You go the other way and see what you can find out.”   

 She turned to Muirgoed, “Poor Koll and Erp are not going to be happy if they have to try to get all the horses back on board. I do hope that this sandbar is not an island!”

 “If it is, then perhaps Erp can get the horses off onto the mainland at low tide,” Muirgoed suggested.

 “You are as practical as usual,” Aud said, smiling.

 “On another practical point, perhaps we could start a fire burning, if we are to be here overnight?”

 “Muirgoed! What an excellent idea.  I have not collected driftwood for a fire since I was a child.  What a perfect way to start our new life in Iceland. All of you, we’ll look for driftwood, and get a good fire burning.  At least we can have a hot drink, and warmer feet!”

 This promising prospect was greeted with a small cheer from the assembled women, children and thralls.   They might be shipwrecked on a sandbar, but after three long cold days and nights on the cramped and chilly ship, the prospect of solid ground, space to move about and a warm meal seemed a great and wonderful luxury.

 Later that evening as the last of the day was straggling into grey twilight, Aud and Muirgoed sat by the fire, watching blue flames dance along the driftwood and twine with the yellow flames of the burning steering oar, with Vig and Asa the deerhounds dozing beside them, and the sound of the roar and hiss of the waves on the sandy shore seemed quiet and distant.

 The little shaggy horses had had the salt combed from their long tangled manes, and were now tethered for the night.  Erp was feeding them, crooning that strange horse-language that they all seemed to know by instinct. The sheep were wandering along the shoreline, nibbling at seaweed.   Some of the thralls were rigging up one of the awnings from the ship as a tent to keep Aud and the other women dry in case of rain in the night.   Brother Ninian was down by the ships, speaking a blessing for the Seal Maiden and the Fionoula, asking that they might be kept safe on this new and dangerously unfamiliar shore.

 Signy and Lilla were wandering along the beach not far away, thin dark figures silhouetted against the light still reflecting from the sea.   They were still looking for bits of driftwood to carry back to the fire.   Aud looked at them thoughtfully.

 “She’s growing up, you know - Signy, I mean,”

 Muirgoed nodded.

 “Time to start thinking of a husband for her, I suppose...” Aud was wistful.

 “You didn’t like leaving Groa behind,” Muirgoed said.

 “No.  No, I didn’t.  Poor Groa.  She will be a great queen, but it was hard to leave her there, with her father gone.  It had to be done, to buy the peace in Caithness, but... I was thinking of a husband here in Iceland for Signy.  Koll, maybe.”

 “He doesn’t have any land of his own anymore,” Muirgoed said, doubtfully.

 Aud laughed “Well, who among us has land, shipwrecked as we are?  We fled from Norway, we fled Caithness and the Islands.  Here we are, a bare remnant with nothing to be proud of but our names.  But Koll is a hersir born, and a Christian too: it is past time he had a wife.  And more than that, I think he will be kind to our little Signy.”

 “You’d not give her the choice?”

 “Would you?”  Aud met her old thrall, her old friend’s eye and they exchanged a long, level look: the look of two women who had both been sold in their time, and had survived.

 “I would.  I dearly wish I could have had the choice - at least once.”

 “And did I not give you the choice? Once when I gave you your freedom, and then again, when I asked you if you would come to Iceland with me, or go your ways back to Argyll?”

 “There’s nothing for us in Argyll now, not for many years” Muirgoed said with a wry smile on her small freckled face.  “A half-forgotten queen-thrall, and her son, the princeling who has never held a sword? We would be torn apart.”

 “And yet, I did give you the choice.”

 “You did. You did.  And you knew that I would no more run away from you than Asa here,” and she stretched out a hand and rubbed the hound’s soft ears.  “And so, it was no real choice at all.  A choice is only a choice if your heart has not already been stolen away,” She looked down at her hands, thin, strong hands with nails bitten to the quick, “If I had a palace in Miklagard waiting for me, still I would be here with you.”

 Aud reached out and touched her shoulder gently, wordlessly.

 “It is different for Signy.  She is young, and her heart is still her own. ”

 Aud snorted. “And very likely she will give it to the first young fool who asks for it and has nothing to offer in exchange but a pretty body, and a beating when he comes in of an evening, all fired up with ale.  Oh, I won’t say I didn’t wish I could choose for myself, when my father married me off to Olaf to buy his Dublin alliance.  But Olaf was a beast when he was drunk, and Koll is not.  Signy is far too young to decide for herself.  But I would like her to have a husband who will live nearby, where I can keep an eye on things.  I cannot have all my family scattered to the winds.  And then there is Lilla -— but no. I have another year or so before I have to start thinking about Lilla.”

 She gave Muirgoed a mischievous smile.  “Maybe by then, that son of yours will have grown his hair out and have a proper steading of his own, and we queens can talk about uniting our royal households.”

 The men were coming up to the fire now, bringing extra wood with them, and the children came too, carrying a great long piece of sea-bleached branch between them.

 “Lilla! Signy! Come and sit by the fire,” Aud called, patting the ground next to her.  Sand was stuck to the children’s feet and the edges of their cloaks and their faces were flushed in the fire-glow.

 “Where will we go, once we have the new steering oar ready?”  Lilla asked Aud.

 “We will go to my brothers, I think.   My little brother Helgi Bjolan, he is a Christian.   His settlement is somewhere to the West of where we have landed from what Koll tells me.   It should not be too hard to find.

 After that, perhaps we will visit my other brother Bjǫrn.  Bjǫrn the Eastman they call him, because he always used to go trading into the East, to the lands of the Rus, and even down as far as Miklagard.  That is a great city in the far south, where the Emperor of Miklagard sits on his gold and purple throne, with leopards at his feet. If we are lucky, perhaps he will tell us all about it.”

 “I’d like that,” Lilla said.

 “And then, next year, when we have explored the land and found the best places - then we will sail along the coast, and we will throw the pillars of my high seat into the sea, and where God chooses that they come ashore, we will know that there will be the place to set up our land-holding.  We will build a home there.”

**Author's Note:**

> I meant to put some geysers and trolls in this, but they didn't want to go. Maybe that's a sequel. 
> 
> Queen Aud is, of course, an important historical figure and one of the great founder-figures of Iceland. Even Muirgoed and Erp pop up in the Icelandic sagas, although the sagas, written some time later, are sometimes inconsistent. Even the names change. It looks like Aud was originally called Unn, or perhaps even Thorunn (she dropped the Thor-, being a Christian). Muirgoed is mentioned, but was probably not related to Erp, and possibly was bought by Aud for her son Thorstein's wife, rather than being a gift to Aud herself. But these are small things really. 
> 
> The sagas I mostly used for reference were Landnámabók, Laxardaela Saga, The Saga of Erik the Red, and the Saga of King Olaf Tryggvason (various translations, sorry I didn't make a note!) .
> 
> I've tried to stick close to the saga accounts, although I made up that Olaf the White was a drunkard. Still, it seems to fit. 
> 
> Thorstein the Red's children were called Olaf Feilan, Groa, Thorgerd, Olof, Osk, Thorhild, and Vigdis  
> Lilla and Signy are not mentioned. I've assumed that these are pet names - or perhaps that Aud didn't like the reference to Thor, as with her own name - and that Signy is really Thorgerd, who does indeed marry Koll the hersir, and founds a settlement with him, and Lilla is perhaps Osk or Thorhild. I don't think Sutcliff mentions Olaf Feilan, Olaf the Little Wolf, Thorstein's oldest son — although he did come to Iceland with Aud, and was apparently her favorite grandchild. Although he's listed first in lists of the children of Thorstein, it looks like he was probably not more than four years old when they sailed for Iceland, so perhaps he's an anonymous baby. 
> 
> Aud is described in the sagas as having been shipwrecked at the sandbar of Vikarskeid, at the mouth of the Olfusa river. All her people and goods survived the wreck, and the sandbar looks like one of the safer places to run ashore on the South coast of Iceland - so I went for it being more of an accidental beaching than a full wreck. 
> 
> The steering oar on a Viking era ship would have been on one side of the boat rather than positioned centrally like the rudder on a modern boat — thus, suddenly being swept sideways onto a sandbank on the 'wrong' side could snap it off. Viking ships were designed to be easy to pull up onto beaches, but poor Koll can't really be blamed for not realising the sand was quite so close: I'm assuming that they also hit an unexpected cross-current which turned the ship sideways on to the waves. 
> 
> (I may also have slightly based Aud's shipwreck on my own teenage experiences of getting my sailing dinghy stuck on the mud of the Taw-Torridge estuary in North Devon. I'm hoping there's nothing seriously unViking about that. :-D ) 
> 
> Viking ships and navigation tools were pretty impressive technology for their time, but there would definitely have been an element of 'point in the direction of Iceland and hope'. Hence why Koll isn't quite sure how far is left to go. 
> 
> The planks that needed new 'treenails' would have been attached using wedges of relatively weak but flexible woods such as willow, rather than iron nails. These had the advantage that they would not rust, and would not split the planks if the planks moved as the wood of the ship, got wet, dried out and seasoned (the Seal Maiden was built of greenwood; ie, they cut the wood and built the ship right away, without leaving it to season. This meant more movement in the body of the ship as it aged). Treenails are not very hardwearing, and would need replacing regularly. Koll is used to having to replace treenails, but he's a bit sad about his steering oar. 
> 
> I'm not going to speculate whether Erp, Muirgoed, and various other freed thralls who are mentioned as travelling with Aud were really all prisoners of war, of noble birth, or whether that was a convenient fiction dreamed up by Icelanders writing sagas a couple of hundred years later as a way to make their ex-thrall ancestors seem more glamorous.


End file.
